Modern communication systems that can provide a large number of capabilities including integration of various communication modalities with different services enable a wider array of communication between people. Social networking applications, multimodal enterprise communication applications, and comparable ones are examples of rapidly proliferating communication systems taking advantage of the modern capabilities.
Many multimodal communication, social networking, and instant messaging applications provide an empty contacts list when they are activated/installed first time. Users are typically required to search and manually add contacts to the contacts list, import from other sources, or perform a combination of these operations before any type of communication and collaboration activity can be initiated. The generation, maintenance, and organization of the contacts list may be a tedious and time consuming task. Because the contacts list is the main entry point for many tasks in multimodal communication, social networking, and instant messaging applications, users who do not maintain a contacts list may end up not using the application.